In a message dated 12/14/2000 12:30:54 AM Eastern Standard Time,
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<<
 A Zimbabwe politician was quoted as saying that children should study
 the US election event closely because it shows that election fraud is
 not only a third world phenomena. To illustrate the point, he made
 the following comments;

 "Imagine that we read of an election occurring anywhere in the third
 world in which the self-declared winner was the son of the former
 prime minister and that former prime minister was himself the former
 head of that nation's secret police (the CIA).

 Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote but won
 based on some old colonial holdover from the nation's pre-democracy
 past (the electoral college).

 Imagine that the self-declared winner's `victory' turned on disputed
 votes cast in a province governed by his brother!

 Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of one district, a district
 heavily favoring the self-declared winner's opponent, led thousands
 of voters to vote for the wrong candidate.

 Imagine that members of that nation's most despised caste, fearing
 for their lives/livelihoods, turned out in record numbers to vote in
 near-universal opposition to the self-declared winner's candidacy.

 Imagine that hundreds of members of that most-despised caste were
 intercepted on their way to the polls by state police operating under
 the authority of the self-declared winner's brother.

 Imagine that six million people voted in the disputed province and
 that the self-declared winner's `lead' was only 327 votes. Fewer,
 certainly, than the vote counting machines' margin of error.

 Imagine that the self-declared winner and his political party opposed
 a more careful by-hand inspection and re-counting of the ballots in
 the disputed province or in its most hotly disputed district.

 Imagine that the self-declared winner, himself a governor of a major
 province, had the worst human rights record of any province in his
 nation and actually led the nation in executions.

 Imagine that a major campaign promise of the self-declared winner was
 to appoint like-minded human rights violators to lifetime positions
 on the high court of that nation.

 None of us would deem such an election to be representative of
 anything other than the self-declared winner's will-to-power. All of
 us, I imagine, would wearily turn the page thinking that it was
 another sad tale of pitiful pre- or anti-democracy peoples in some
 strange, faraway elsewhere."
  >>